The younger generation's new wave of political correctness is a danger to society

Here’s a question? Do you become a kind of comedy right-wing bigot as you get older?

For many years there was a general assumption that you started out left-wing and liberal in your twenties and then gradually shuffled to the right until, just before your death, you sounded like you were channelling the Chicago school of economics by way of Bernard Manning.

A lot of this was down to money. Back in the '70s, marginal tax rates were above 90 per cent. If you were young and poor and idealistic, these didn’t affect you but, as your income rose, they began to. So drifting right as you got older was self-interest. This is best summed up in the famous line: “If a man is not a socialist when he is 20, he has no heart. If he is still a socialist at 40, he has no brain.”

But this isn’t true any more. I was a liberal at 20 and I’m a liberal now, at 47. I have the same ideological trappings as I always have done. I’m laissez-faire socially and fiscally conservative. I’m happy with gay marriage and equality and would like to see drugs legalised, but I also want markets that are broadly free, tax rates that encourage business and so on.

The reason for for this is that ideology has become unbundled. Back in the '70s, if you were really pro-equality, you had little choice but to align yourself with the economic left. Now you can choose your views from a kind of buffet – and it’s perfectly normal to like free trade alongside a load of stuff that would once have belonged on a hippyish fringe.

So why am I bringing all this up? Because the last few years have seen the dawn of a new kind of political correctness which I think of as “PC 2.0”. This is the movement that seeks to de-platform Germaine Greer and wants every trace of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oxford. It’s the kind of thinking that has made gender so confusing that I don’t even know what the right view is any more, although I’m pretty sure that my view will be the wrong one, whatever it is.

A student wears a sticker calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape TownCredit:
Reuters/Mike Hutchings

Suddenly, those of us who had never worried about being seen as politically unsound are being cast as ageing, right-wing bigots. It’s weird finding yourself on the “reactionary” side of the argument with one of the world’s most famous feminists. Yes, in the blink of an eye, Germaine and I have become those crusty old people who start spouting unacceptable platitudes after a couple of drinks.

Because I am getting older, this has made me sit up and think. Am I becoming a ideologically unsound old white male? Have I become Ukip material without noticing? Am I now bigoted Uncle Alex? This is what the new left would like me to think. But it is they that have changed, not me.

When I was university in the late '80s, there were two sorts of PC. One was pretty sensible and was finishing the largely good work of the '60s and '70s. It wasn’t unreasonable that women didn’t want to be called “chairman” or, for that matter, “darling.” It was hard to claim that gay jokes were OK if racist jokes were not. And, of course, there was the fight to end apartheid. It was difficult to argue with any of this (although the reactionary Young Conservatives who thought “Hang Mandela” T-shirts were the funniest thing ever certainly tried).

The other kind of PC belonged to the hardline lefties. They were so laughably out of step with 1988 that all we did was laugh at them. They sold Socialist Worker and ran the student union and thought Lenin and Stalin were just great. We ignored them while we got pissed and stoned and had fun, never imagining that their shabby dreams (to become hard-left councillors with a long-term view to becoming hard-left Labour MPs) would lead anywhere. I guess we were wrong and they were playing a long-odds, long game.

A young Jeremy Corbyn in an anti-apartheid protestCredit:
Reuters/Stefan Wermuth

This is what it comes down to though. PC 2.0 has very little to do with sensible stuff like genuine equality for men and women – and everything to do with the weird fringe that you used to find in universities and on loony-left London Councils. It’s not about sticking up for rights and freedoms. Rather it’s about closing down debate and imposing ideological purity.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic here, just look at how many mainstream feminists have fallen foul of the Trans-Stasi. Look at how Rhodes Must Fall wants to rewrite history in a way that, were it taken to its natural conclusion, would mean Brits burning books about those dreadful colonialists, the Romans and the Normans. Look at how Corbyn’s slightly-at-arm’s-length army threaten to deselect any Labour MP who shows insufficient enthusiasm for the Dear Leader. And look at how dissent is stamped on in a way that must have China’s rulers quietly applauding.

All this might sound like a storm in a political teacup but it has some pretty horrible real-world effects too. We’ve seen it in Rotherham and, more recently, in Cologne. Cultural correctness means we worry about offending the sensitivities of the communities from which sex attackers come and ignore the victims. We see it when we’re incapable of having sensible conversations about how Islam might fit into liberal western democracies. We see it when we tie ourselves up in knots over immigration for fear of saying anything wrong. And we see it when universities talk about banning books because they might upset students.

Like something out of a zombie film, the crazy left has risen from the dead and infected the Labour Party and the more impressionable parts of higher education. We ignored the problem at first.

Because we tend to conflate authoritarianism with the right, we tend to forget the left can be just as bad. But now the hard left has hijacked an entire political party, we need to stand up to it and stop the contagion spreading any further.

Here, the most important thing to remember is that those us who have signed up to the tolerant, liberal, mainstream consensus do stand for something. The trouble with being a centrist is that it’s easy to assume you don’t believe in much, compared to the inflamed passions on the wilder shores of the left and the the right. But actually we have loads that’s worth defending. Freedom of speech, for starters. Equality for everyone – including girls born in Tower Hamlets. Tolerance. The values of the Enlightenment. And so on. What’s more, these are the most important things: get them right and pretty much everything else follows.

Of course, if you say this, you’ll still get cast as ageing white dinosaur who needs to check his privilege. But it’s not you demanding a safe space where other people can’t speak and it’s not you trying to airbrush people out of history like Stalin’s photographers. It’s not you dressing authoritarianism in the clothes of righteousness. Rather it’s the 26-year old member of Momentum who wants to kick out a long-serving Labour MP and the student activist who is wondering which 300-year-old statue to target today.

As for why they’re doing it, it’s like electing Corbyn. They’re too young to remember how crazy all this stuff was back in the 80s. So it seems exciting and sexy and different, unlike the boring, tolerant liberal consensus that has worked so well for so long. But it’s a fantasy and it’ll end in tears. When it does, in a strange inversion of the norm, perhaps we’ll see many of today’s young authoritarians become more tolerant and liberal as they get older.